Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  His mouth thinned. ‘Yeah. I may have done a little more.’ His fingers danced a nervous tattoo on the steering wheel. ‘Personally, I don’t see the big deal myself. You’re someone who went through a tough time and bounced back. I’m not sure it justifies all of this drama but, you know, Robert and Greta are coppers, and they think like coppers . . .’ He shrugged again, and his hands fell to his thighs with a soft slap. ‘They’re just being cautious.’

  I looked away. ‘You know, Martin . . . there are things they don’t know about me at my work. About the . . .’

  ‘Suicide attempts?’

  ‘There was no suicide attempt,’ I said quickly, suddenly very alarmed. ‘The Narrowbourne thing was an accidental overdose of my anxiety medication. All they know at work is the one, isolated breakdown that happened years ago when I graduated and was living in London.’

  They can’t actually fire you for having a history of mental illness – it counts as illegal discrimination under law. Thus, it doesn’t appear in your DBS check, which is what they call the old Criminal Records Bureau or CRB check that all teachers have to pass before they are allowed access to children or vulnerable adults.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were hospitalized twice . . . once in London and once here, in Narrowbourne hospital.’

  ‘The second time was hardly anything,’ I said, and I could feel my cheeks heating up again. ‘They were over-cautious. I was actually fine. Not that it even matters, because if they find out about the second forced admittance at Narrowbourne, I’m done at that school.’

  ‘But it would be discrimination if they fired you.’

  I shook my head, annoyed at his denseness. ‘You don’t understand. The first one was years ago, in the distant past, but the second was relatively recent, while I was working at the school, in fact. They never found out the full extent of it.

  ‘They couldn’t fire me. But if they found out about it, they could make my life very awkward until I quit.’

  ‘Would they?’ he asked.

  I paused, thinking about Ben. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He rubbed his face. ‘I get the impression there’s more. You can’t seriously think they would fire you just for the things you describe.’

  I raised my hands to my temples. I was trembling.

  ‘Margot?’

  I put my hands in my lap, faced him. I had no choice.

  I had to trust him.

  ‘I . . . Martin, before the nuns took me in, I’d run away from home. I did a lot of things. I got hooked on heroin – I was injecting it by the end. The nuns got me off it, but I’ve still got an affray arrest from when I was a minor.’ I ran my hands through my hair, frantic. ‘The school can’t find out about that.’

  The arrest had resulted in a caution because I’d been under seventeen at the time, and it had never turned up in a background check. I understand they’ve relaxed the rules since and my caution is less likely to turn up than ever before – but again, if the board of governors found out about my scandalous past, it wouldn’t matter. They couldn’t fire me, but I would be well on my way to some sort of constructive dismissal. After all, we couldn’t have all the little darlings at school exposed to my depraved and debauching influence. And just because they couldn’t boot me out directly didn’t mean they couldn’t make my life a misery until I left.

  No, no, no. This can’t happen.

  When I took my hands away from my eyes Martin was looking at me.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re panicking about, Margot,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to tell your employers about this? You haven’t done anything wrong. You passed the background check, so it’s not like you’ll fail it now.’

  I took a deep breath. I wanted to shake him.

  ‘I’m panicking because information always wants to escape.’ I sighed. ‘That’s the way of the world. My past, Bethan Avery’s fate – it all wants to escape. That’s why this is happening, after all.’

  His reply was a sympathetic half-smile. He knew it was true.

  ‘I just . . . if that cow . . . sorry,’ I say, stopping myself. ‘I realize she’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘She is a friend of mine,’ he said mildly. ‘But you’re right, she was a bit of a cow today.’

  ‘If she or anyone else starts poking around in my life asking questions . . .’ I closed my eyes, let my head sink back. ‘I just need to publish this damned appeal, and Bethan Avery will either come forward or we’ll never hear from her again. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ He sat back in the driver’s seat, regarding me. ‘Unless you don’t want to do this any more.’

  ‘What do you mean? You think that I should just drop it?’

  ‘You’ve done your best, I’m not sure anyone would blame you.’

  ‘No.’ I took a deep breath, steadied myself. ‘I would blame me.’ I met his gaze. ‘Katie’s still missing, isn’t she? I would blame me.’

  He didn’t reply for a long moment.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, turning the key in the engine. ‘You look like a woman that could use a drink.’

  11

  I cannot remember how I came across the nuns. I only know that I fell into their eccentric orbit, somehow. They used to send a plain-clothes nun or one of the lay volunteers to hand out cards at coach stations, in an attempt to rescue the young flotsam and jetsam of the provinces as they washed up in London, and I must have taken one.

  But I remember my little bunk in the upper dorm of St Felicity’s, with its thin but rigorously boiled sheets, and the wailing sirens and roars of night buses that came in through the sliver of open window.

  St Felicity’s, or Flicks as it was more commonly known, was run by the Sisters of St Mary of Good Counsel. In those days they wore habits – pale grey knee-length dresses, with short white wimples and veils, ugly taupe stockings (I asked about this and was told black was considered too racy) and sturdy brown shoes. They smelled of clean sweat and plain soap. Even after years of living with them, they never lost that aura of consecrated otherness, which I could admire but never had any desire to emulate.

  They were managed by a woman called Mother Cecilia, who was from a little town in Fife called Lochgelly, and spoke with a soft accent. She seemed ancient to me, and was grey and ivory and paper-thin, and rustled wherever she walked – she made me think of spun lace, or fabric so worn that the sun shone through it. That said, it would be wrong to imply that she was in any way infirm or weak; she ruled St Felicity’s, and the nuns, with a kind of strident ferocity and energy, like a female Gandalf.

  There were two parts to St Felicity’s – one was a pair of large, rambling Victorian semis that had been knocked through and into which homeless women were buzzed via the triple-locked door on the left side of the building. The front door on the other side, peeling and weather-stained, was never used and the bolt had rusted shut. (‘That’s the Golden Gate, child,’ Mother Cecilia replied one day to my puzzled question. ‘Like the one in Jerusalem. It won’t open until the Messiah knocks.’)

  The second part of their portfolio was a modern low-rise with six flats in Surrey Quays, the address of which was kept secret. When I was with the nuns for a while, I saw more of it. A high wall surrounded it, pierced by a single electronic gate, the top of which was fleeced with barbed wire, like a command post in a hidden war. It was a refuge for victims of domestic violence, particularly women with children, and nuns with business there changed into street clothes before setting off, lest their distinctive habits lead danger to the door. The world is a perilous place for women – that is the other thing the nuns taught me.

  I remember going there on an errand with Mother Cecilia once, who appeared like a stranger to me in a serge skirt and lumpen black jacket, her short grey hair covered by a rose-printed scarf, as though keeping her head uncovered, even for a short time, might fry her delicate hothouse brain.

  And it was a delicate
hothouse brain. She had, at some point in her life, been extensively educated, and knew Greek, Latin and French.

  To me, then, her powers over history and language seemed nothing less than alchemical wizardry, the sort of thing that centuries ago would have seen her burned. She would read things aloud in Latin and Greek, if asked, and I would listen, amazed, soaking in its magic, the music of the names of lost heroes and villains and aeons, buried under tide and dust.

  I don’t remember how I stumbled on this hidden facet to her in the midst of a loud, busy, chaotic homeless shelter. I just know that I did, and somehow, for some reason, she took me under her wing. It turns out it’s true, you never forget a good teacher. I devoured the books she lent me – simple elementary grammars and course books designed for children at first, before moving on to others, many of them surprising possessions for a nun – the poetry of Catullus, for example.

  She’s the reason I became a teacher myself. If I could pass on her gift to me to just one person, I would consider my life’s debts paid.

  And I believe I have run up enormous debts in my time.

  ‘The secret key to the history of the world,’ she said, ‘is to know its mother tongue. That way, my dear, you’ll always get to the living heart of a thing – the voices out of the past will speak directly to your soul. Your life and thoughts should never require a translator.’

  I thought about this all the way home as Martin drove.

  And the more I thought about those lost years, and the people I met in the warren of that shelter, and in the fortified flats of Surrey Quays – those places where the world’s female driftwood washed up – the more I wondered whether I had, perhaps, met Bethan Avery before.

  ‘Who can tell me who Nemesis is?’

  I was back in my Classics class on Monday morning – this was the Year Tens who were studying, for their sins, the Oresteian trilogy by Aeschylus. I was priming them, ahead of time, with a little ancient Greek cosmology before they started reading. I’d already done a whistle-stop tour of the Olympian gods, and was about to start on the more exotic parts of the pantheon.

  I really liked my Year Ten class, who by a happy accident were sprinkled with cheerful, interested kids and the occasional genuine wit.

  I liked them more than usual this morning, because Saturday’s adventures in London had demonstrated that I was nearer than usual to losing them. I hadn’t slept a wink all weekend.

  Hands went up.

  ‘Nemesis is your worst enemy, Miss,’ supplied Oliver Monto, a tall youth with a massive dark afro, once I nodded at him. ‘The thing that gets you, like, because of your own flaws.’

  I nodded and then shrugged. ‘Yes and no.’ I tried not to think about how apposite this summary was to my own situation. ‘I mean, you’re right, but that’s only what “having a nemesis” has come to mean nowadays. But it wasn’t always that way. The word itself comes from ancient Greece, and is the name of a goddess. Does anyone know what she was the goddess of?’

  There was a pause. ‘Revenge?’ someone ventured at the back, not wishing to put their hand up and commit.

  ‘Yep, vengeance. But a particular type of vengeance.’ I wandered over and drew a large cross on the board. In the upper left-hand corner I wrote Nemesis. ‘The Greeks imagined two major categories of crime that needed punishment,’ I said, counting them off on my fingers while the class watched. ‘There are the crimes mortals commit against the gods – crimes such as hubris, or personal arrogance in the face of divine will,’ I tapped on Nemesis’s name, ‘and there are the crimes that are committed by mortals against one another despite the gods’ injunction.’

  I tapped on the right-hand upper quadrant of the cross. ‘So, who do you think punishes mortals for the crimes they commit against each other?’

  The room was silent while everyone frowned. Outside, a lorry honked angrily on Trumpington Road.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘The goddesses that punish mortals are called the Erinyes, or you might have heard them called their other name – the Furies. Erinyes literally means “the Angry Ones”, though they are sometimes called “the Kindly Ones” out of respect for their powers.’

  There was an approving gasp somewhere, as if something had made sense.

  ‘The Furies are ancient goddesses of the underworld – older than the Olympian gods – and it is their job to punish sins. Traditionally, there are three of them and they are named. First is Alecto,’ I said, writing her name in the lower right-hand quadrant of the diagram. ‘And her name means “unceasing anger”. Next is Megaera, and her name means “the grudging one” or “the jealous one”. And finally,’ I said, still writing, ‘There is Tisiphone. And Tisiphone’s name means “implacable revenge”. Together they punish the most serious crimes, such as murder or rape, particularly when those crimes involve family members.

  ‘So,’ I said, putting the chalk down. ‘How do you think the Furies punish criminals?’

  ‘They chase after them and rip them apart,’ said Charlotte, a tiny blonde wisp of a girl.

  ‘Sort of, though it’s a little crueller than that. Aeschylus tells us they locate their prey by smelling upon them the blood of those they’ve harmed . . .’

  ‘Eww,’ someone said at the front.

  ‘They then pursue their quarry day and night with shrieks and curses, wielding iron whips . . .’

  ‘They nag you to death!’ chipped in Malek Singh from the back of the class, making scattered laughter ripple across the room.

  ‘You may find it funny,’ I said, though I was smiling when the chuckles settled down. ‘But when you think about it, what the ancient Greeks are describing here is the psychological effect of a guilty conscience, and the terror of exposure—’

  With a sudden crash the bell rang and I had lost them.

  ‘All right,’ I bellowed over the clatter of books and shifting chairs. ‘I want you to be up to speed on your Olympian gods and chthonic goddesses for next week! Which means I want you to know what “chthonic” means!’

  12

  They had placed the line at the very bottom of my column, which I was now reading over in the staff room. My picture seemed huge, irrelevant and a little saccharine. I wondered if I might have scared Bethan off.

  You’re being ridiculous, I told myself, which is something you are very good at. The thing only went in the paper on Saturday night. Give it a chance.

  Through the staff room windows I could hear the distant yells and shouts of the children, and a quick breeze was swiping yellow-gold chestnut leaves off the trees, and they fluttered down in whirling drifts on to the lawn outside. I looked down at the message I’d put in the paper. I was trying, desperately, to keep a hold on my world – my job, my vanished husband and my column – but I was disconnecting. The ties to my ordinary life were loosening, snapping, and the dark world of Bethan Avery was becoming more real than my own. After all, what were my petty griefs against the irresistible pull of her stricken letters?

  I dreamed of her regularly. Sometimes I saw her, but more often than not she was a presence, a person I knew was in the room but who was never quite in focus, shadowy and plaintive and wisp thin; a cloud, a vapour.

  A ghost.

  Once again, I reminded myself not to chew my nails.

  I wasn’t well and I felt fine. I breathed easily but far too quickly, my eyes were bright – too bright; I’d dispensed with the pills that slowed down my thoughts, but now they raced away out of control.

  I was living in strange days.

  All I ever knew about drugs I learned from Angelique.

  I met her while I was in St Felicity’s. She was in the bunk above me in the dorm – a slight teenage girl who dyed her dark hair white-blonde, and who was roughly the same age and height as me. Her skin was pale and spotty, her lips dry, and she perpetually dabbed at them with a tube of cherry Chapstik. She did not really sleep the first night she arrived, instead tossing and turning endlessly above me, making the old planks creak. I did not rea
lly sleep either, as a rule, so it didn’t trouble me, but I wondered at her pathological restlessness.

  At eight the next morning in the shelter cafeteria, I was eating my frugal breakfast of roll, jam and butter. I was surprised this morning to find my upper neighbour had brought her tray over and was settling in next to me, straddling the bench and arranging her long, pathetically skinny legs under the trestle table. With her big eyes and narrow body she resembled a distressed gazelle, and her clothes were hanging off her.

  I regarded her suspiciously.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  She did not reply, but nodded, not meeting my gaze. We ate in silence, and after she had picked at her roll, tearing tiny holes out of it, like a bird might, and licked the jam out of the little packet and drained her tea, she got up and left without a word.

  ‘O’Neill wants to do a reconstruction,’ said Martin.

  We were back on King’s Parade, only this time we had graduated from coffee to lunch in the Cambridge Chop House, somewhere I’d passed dozens of times but never eaten in. I wore a dark green jersey top and rust-coloured skirt and boots, all the while persuading myself that I had not dressed with any extra care for this meeting. My make-up was also an afterthought, I had explained to myself, while I carefully slicked my lips a muted dark pink.

  I paused, my fork suspended over my cod and cheddar fishcakes. ‘What sort of reconstruction?’

  ‘A crime reconstruction,’ Martin replied, slicing into his calves’ liver with gusto. ‘Filmed, and broadcast on television.’

  ‘For Bethan?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘After so long? I thought I read that there had been one already, in the nineties, why don’t they show that one again?’

  He was chewing now, so shook his head silently. ‘No. They want a new one,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘They want to include some details from the letters. Alex Penycote and his description, for one.’

  I didn’t know what I felt about this. On the one hand, good, but on the other hand, Katie had been missing for nearly six weeks, during which time nobody had been looking for her, and now . . . this – this sudden escalation in the hunt for what could be the wrong girl.